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Program Synopsis

One night while on shore leave in Sasebo, Japan, U.S. sailor Allen Schindler was followed into a public restroom and beaten to death. While given a military funeral, it was still a full two months after his brutal murder that his mother, Dorothy Hajdys, discovered that her son had been killed by two of his own shipmates because he was gay. Based on actual events, the telefilm shows how Hajdys -- a quiet woman from Chicago -- confronted the military to prevent an attempted cover-up of the hate crime and bring justice to her son's killers. In doing so, she came to grips with her own homophobia in learning to respect who her son was.